Chapter VI: The Romantic Movement: Its Characteristics and Its Growth (2)

A few months before the political revolution of July, 1830, occurred the outbreak of one of the historic artistic revolutions of the capital. Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani,’ on which the young romantic school centred its hopes, was first performed on February 25, before an audience that took it as a matter of life and death. The performance was permitted, so tradition says, in the expectation that the play would discredit the romantic school once and for all. The principal actress, Mlle. Mars, was outraged by Hugo’s imagery, and refused point blank to call Firmin her ‘lion, superb and generous.’ A goodly _claque_, drawn from the ateliers and salons, brought the play to an overwhelming triumph, and for fifteen years the dominance of the romantic school was indisputable.

This romantic school was somewhat parallel to that of Germany, and, in a general way, took the same inspiration. The literary influences, outside of the inevitable Rousseau and Chateaubriand of France itself, were chiefly Grimm’s recensions of old tales, Schiller’s plays, Schlegel’s philosophical and historical works; Goethe’s _Faust_, as well as our old friend _Werther_; Herder’s ‘Thoughts on the Philosophy of History’; Shakespeare and Dante as a matter of course; Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and any number of collections of mediæval tales and poems, foreign as well as French. This much the French and German romanticists had in common. But the movement had scarcely any political tinge, though political influences developed out of it. By a curious inversion the literary radicals were the legitimists and political conservatives, and the classicists the political revolutionists--perhaps a remnant of the Revolution, when the republicans were turning to the art and literature of Greece for ideals of ‘purity.’

For the French intellectuals had perhaps had enough of political life, whereas the Germans were starved for it. At any rate, the French romanticists were almost wholly concerned with artistic canons. To them romanticism meant freedom of the imagination, the demolishing of classical forms and traditional rules, the mixing of the genres ‘as they are mixed in life’; the rendering of the language more sensuous and flexible, and, above all, the expression of the subjective and individual point of view. They had a great cult for the historic, and their plays are filled with local color (real or supposed) of the time in which their action is laid. They supposed themselves to be returning to real life, using everyday details and painting men as they are. In particular they made their work more intimately emotional; they substituted the image for the metaphor, and the pictorial word for the abstract word. This last fact is of greatest importance in its influence on romantic music. The painting of the time, though by no means so radical in technique as that of music, showed the influences of the great social overturning. Subjects were taken from contemporary or recent times--the doings of the French in the Far East, the campaigns of Napoleon, or from the natural scenery round about Paris, renouncing the ‘adjusted landscape’ of the classicists with a ruined temple in the foreground. Scenes from the Revolution came into painting, and the drama of the private soldier or private citizen gained human importance. Géricault emphasized sensuous color as against the severe classicist David. The leader, and perhaps the most typical member, of the romantic school was Delacroix, a defender of the art of the Middle Ages as against the exaggerated cult of the Greeks. He took his subjects ‘from Dante, Shakespeare, Byron (heroes of the literary romanticism); from the history of the Crusades, of the French Revolution, and of the Greek revolt against the Turks. He painted with a feverish energy of life and expression, a deep and poetic sense of color. His bold, ample technique thrust aside the smooth timidities of the imitators and prepared the way for modern impressionism.’[80]

But there was still another result of the suppression of political tendencies in French romantic literature. In looking to the outer world for inspiration (as every artist must) the writers of the time, turning from contemporary politics, inevitably saw before their eyes Napoleon the Great, now no longer Corsican adventurer and personal despot, but national hero and creator of magnificent epics. The young people of this time did not remember the miseries of the Napoleonic wars; they remembered only their largeness and glory. Fifteen years after the abdication of Napoleon the inspiration of Napoleon came to literary expression. It was a passion for bigness. Victor Hugo’s professed purpose was to bring the whole of life within the compass of a work of art. Every emotion was raised to its nth power. Hernani passes from one cataclysmic experience to another; the whole of life seems to depend on the blowing of a hunting horn. The painting of the time, under Géricault, Delacroix, and Delaroche, was grandiose and pompous. The stage of the theatre was filled with magnificent pictures. A nation comes to insurrection in _William Tell_; Catholicism and Protestantism grapple to the death in _Les Huguenots_. But not only extensively but intensively this cult of bigness was developed. Victor Hugo sums up the whole of life in a phrase. The musicians had caught the trick; Meyerbeer was of Victor Hugo’s stature in some things. He gets the epic clang in a single couplet, as in the ‘Blessing of the Poignards’ or in the G flat section of the fourth act duet from _Les Huguenots_. And this heroic quality came to its finest expression in Liszt, some of whose themes, like that of Tasso

or that of _Les Préludes_

seem to say, _Arma virumque cano_.

V

If ever a man was made to respond to this Paris of 1830 it was Franz Liszt. Heroic virtuosity was a solid half of its Credo. Victor Hugo, as a virtuoso of language, must be placed beside the greatest writers of all time--Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and whom else? No less can be said for Liszt in regard to the piano. He was born in 1811 in Raiding, Hungary. He is commonly supposed to be partly Hungarian in blood, although German biographers deny this, asserting that the name originally had the common German form of List. Almost before he could walk he was at the piano. At the age of nine he appeared in public. And at the age of twelve he was a pianist of international reputation. How such virtuosity came to be, no one can explain. Most things in music can be traced in some degree to their causes. But in such a case as this the miracle can be explained neither by his instruction nor by his parentage nor by any external conditions. It is one of the things that must be set down as a pure gift of Heaven. Prominent noblemen guaranteed his further education and, after a few months of study in Vienna, under Czerny and Salieri, he and his father went to Paris, which was to be the centre of his life for some twenty years. He was the sensation of polite Paris within a few months after his arrival and he presently had pupils of noble blood at outrageous prices. Two years after his arrival--that is, when he was fourteen--a one-act operetta of his, _Don Sanche_, was performed at the Académie Royale. Two years later his father died and he was thrown on his own resources as teacher and concert pianist. Then, in 1830, he fell sick following an unhappy love affair, and his life was despaired of until, in the words of his mother, ‘he was cured by the sound of the cannon.’

How did the Paris of 1830, and particularly the temper of Parisian life, affect Liszt? ‘Monsieur Mignet,’ he said, ‘teach me all of French literature.’ Here is a new thing in music--a musician who dares take all knowledge to be his province. He writes, about this time: ‘For two weeks my mind and my fingers have been working like two of the damned: Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are about me. I study them, meditate them, devour them furiously.’ He conceived a huge admiration for Hugo’s _Marion de Lorme_ and Schiller’s _Wilhelm Tell_. Be sure, too, that he was busy reading the artistic theories of the romanticists and translating them into musical terms. The revolution of 1830 had immediate concrete results in his music; he sketched a Revolutionary Symphony, part of which later became incorporated into his symphonic poem, _Heroïde Funèbre_. He made a brilliant arrangement of the _Marseillaise_ and wrote the first number of his ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ on the insurrection of the workmen at Lyon.

The early manifestations of modern socialistic theory were then in the making--in the cult of Saint-Simon--and Liszt was drawn to them. For many years it was supposed that he was actually a member of the order, though he later denied this. The Saint-Simonians had a concrete scheme of communistic society, and a sort of religious metaphysic. This latter, if not the former, impressed Liszt deeply, especially because of the place given to art as expressing the ideal toward which the people--the whole people--would strive. But a still stronger influence over Liszt was that of the revolutionary abbé, Lamennais. Lamennais was a devout Catholic, but, like many of the priesthood during the first revolution, he was also an ardent democrat. He took it as self-evident that religion was for all men, that God is no respecter of persons. He was pained by the rôle of the Catholic Church in the French Revolution--its continual siding with the ministers of despotism, its readiness to give its blessing and its huge moral influence to any reactionary government which would offer it material enrichment. He felt it was necessary--no less in the interest of the Church than in that of the people--that the Catholic Church should be the defender of democracy against reactionary princes. He was doing precisely what such men as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are trying to do in England to-day. His influence in Paris was great and he became the rallying point for the liberal party in the Church. Perhaps if his counsel had prevailed the Church would not have become in the people’s minds the enemy of all their liberties and would have retained its temporal possessions in the war for Italian unity forty years later. Liszt had always been a Catholic, and in his earlier youth had been prevented from taking holy orders only by his father’s express command. Now he found Lamennais’ philosophy meat to his soul, and Lamennais saw in him the great artist who was to exemplify to the world his philosophy of art. In 1834 Liszt published in the _Gazette Musicale de Paris_ an essay embodying his social philosophy of art.

Several points in this manifesto are of importance in indicating what four years of revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt the artist. Though primarily a virtuoso, Liszt had been raised above the mere vain delight of exciting admiration in the crowd. He had made up his mind to become a creative artist with all his powers. He had asserted the artist’s right to do his own thinking, to be a man in any way he saw fit. He had accepted as gospel the romanticist creed that rules must be broken whenever artistic expression demands it and had imbibed to the full the literary and romantic imagery of the school. He had linked up his virtuoso’s sense of the crowd with the only thing that could redeem it and make it an art--the human being’s sense of democracy. And he had outlined with great accuracy (so far as his form of speech allowed) the nature of the music which he was later to compose. We can nowhere find a better description of the music of Liszt at its best than Liszt’s own description of the future ‘humanitarian’ music--which partakes ‘in the largest possible proportions of the characteristics of both the theatre and the church--dramatic and holy, splendid and simple, solemn and serious, fiery, stormy, and calm.’ In this democracy Liszt the virtuoso and Liszt the Catholic find at last their synthesis.

How many purely musical influences operated upon Liszt in these years it is hard to say. We know that he felt the message of Meyerbeer and Rossini (such as it was) and raised it to its noblest form in his symphonic poems--the message of magnificence and high romance. But it is fair to say, also, that he appreciated at its true value every sort of music that came within his range of vision--Schubert’s songs, Chopin’s exquisite pianistic traceries, Beethoven’s symphonies, and the fashionable Italian operas of the day. He arranged an astonishing number and variety of works for the piano, catching with wizard-like certainty the essential beauties of each. But probably the most profound musical influence was that of Berlioz, who seemed the very incarnation of the spirit of 1830. Berlioz’s partial freeing of the symphonic form, his radical harmony, and, most of all, his use of the _idée fixe_ or representative melody (which Liszt later developed in his symphonic poems) powerfully impressed Liszt and came to full fruit ten years later.

One more influence must be recorded for Liszt’s early Parisian years. It was that of Paganini, who made his first appearance at the capital in 1831. Here was the virtuoso pure and simple. He excited Liszt’s highest admiration and stimulated him to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. In 1826 Liszt had published his first études, showing all that was most characteristic in his piano technique at that time. After Paganini had stormed Paris he arranged some of the violinist’s études for the piano, and the advance in piano technique shown between these and the earlier studies is marked.

But Liszt had by this time thought too much and too deeply ever to believe that the technical was the whole or even the most important part of an artist. He appreciates the value of Paganini and the place of technical virtuosity in art, but he writes: ‘The form should not sound, but the spirit speak! Then only does the virtuoso become the high priest of art, in whose mouth dead letters assume life and meaning, and whose lips reveal the secrets of art to the sons of men....’ Finally, note that, amid all this dogma and cocksureness, Liszt understood with true humility that he was not expressing ultimate truth, that he spoke for art in a transition stage, and was the artistic expression of a transitional culture. ‘You accuse me,’ he said to the poet Heine, ‘of being immature and unstable in my ideas, and as a proof you ennumerate the many causes which, according to you, I have embraced with ardor. But this accusation which you bring against me alone, shouldn’t it, in justice, be brought against the whole generation? Are we not unstable in our peculiar situation between a past which we reject and a future which we do not yet understand?’ Thus revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt a conscious instrument in the transition of music.

For some ten years Liszt remained the concert pianist. His concert tours took him all over Europe, ‘like a wandering gypsy.’ He even dreamed of coming to America. In 1840 he went to Hungary and visited his birthplace. He rode in a coach, thus fulfilling, in the minds of the villagers, the prophecy of an old gypsy in his youth, that he should return ‘in a glass carriage.’ In his book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ he gives a highly colored and delightful account of how he was received by the gypsies, how he spent a night in their camp, how he was accompanied on his way by them and serenaded until he was out of sight. The trip made a lasting impression on his mind. He had heard once more the gypsy tunes which had so thrilled him in his earliest childhood, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies were the result.

In 1833, in Paris, he was introduced to the Countess d’Agoult, and between the two there sprang up a violent attachment. They lived together for some ten years, concerning which Liszt’s biographer, Chantavoine, says bluntly, ‘the first was the happiest.’ They had three children, one of them the wife of the French statesman, Émile Ollivier, and another the wife of von Bülow and later of Richard Wagner. Eventually they separated.

In 1842 Liszt was invited by the grand duke of Weimar to conduct a series of concerts each year in the city of Goethe and Schiller. Soon afterward he became director of the court theatre. He gave to Weimar ten years of brilliant eminence, performing, among other works, Wagner’s _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, and ‘Flying Dutchman’; Berlioz’s _Benvenuto Cellini_; Schumann’s _Genoveva_ and his scenes from _Manfred_; Schubert’s _Alfonso und Estrella_; and Cornelius’ ‘The Barber of Bagdad.’ The last work, an attempt to apply Wagnerian principles to comic opera, was received with extreme coldness, and Liszt in disgust gave up his position, leaving Weimar in 1861. But during these years he had composed many of the most important of his works.

_After a painting by Josef Danhauser_

From this time until his death at Bayreuth in 1886 he divided his life between Buda-Pesth, Weimar, and Rome. In the ‘Eternal City’ the religious nature of the man came to full expression and he studied the lore of the Church like a loyal Catholic, being granted the honorary title of Abbé. The revolutionist of 1834 had become the religious mystic. Rome and the magnificent traditions of the Church filled his imagination.

Liszt’s compositions may be roughly divided into three periods: first, the piano period, extending from 1826 to 1842; second, the orchestral period, from 1842 to 1860 (mostly during his residence at Weimar); and, third, his choral period, from which date his religious works. The nature of these compositions and their contribution to the development of music will be discussed in succeeding chapters. Here we need only recall a few of their chief characteristics. Of his twelve hundred compositions, some seven hundred are original and the others mostly piano transcriptions of orchestral and operatic works of all sorts. Certainly he wrote too much, and not a little of his work must be set down as trash, or near it. But some of it is of the highest musical quality and was of the greatest importance in musical development. The most typical of modern musical forms--the symphonic poem--is due solely to him. He formulated the theory of it and gave it brilliant exemplification. His mastery of piano technique is, of course, unequalled. He made the piano, on the one hand, a small orchestra, and, on the other, an individual voice. While he by no means developed all the possibilities of the instrument (Chopin and Schumann contributed more that was of musical value), he extended its range--its avoirdupois, one might almost say--as no other musician has done. His piano transcriptions, though somewhat distrusted nowadays, greatly increased the popularity of the instrument, and, in some cases, were the chief means of spreading the reputations of certain composers. His use of the orchestra was hardly less masterful than that of Berlioz and Wagner; in particular he gave full importance to the individuality of instruments and emphasized the sensuous qualities of their tone. More, perhaps, than any other composer, he effected the union of pure music with the poetical or pictorial idea. His use of chromatic harmony was at times as daring as that of Berlioz and antedated that of Wagner, who borrowed richly from him. Only his religious music, among his great works, must be accounted comparatively a failure. He had great hopes, when he went to Rome, of becoming the Palestrina of the modern Church. But the Church would have none of his theatrical religious music, while the public has been little more hospitable.

Intimate biographies of Liszt have succeeded in staining the brilliant colors of the Liszt myth, but, on the whole, no composer who gained a prodigious reputation during his lifetime has lived up to it better, so to speak, after his death. As an unrivalled concert pianist, the one conqueror who never suffered a defeat, he might have become vain and jealous. There is hardly a trace of vanity or jealousy in his nature. His appreciation of other composers was always generous and remarkably just. No amount of difference in school or aim could ever obscure, in his eyes, the real worth of a man. Wagner, Berlioz, and a host of others owed much of their reputation to him. His life at Weimar was one continued crusade on behalf of little known geniuses. His financial generosity was very great; though the income from his concerts was huge he never, after 1847, gave a recital for his own benefit. In our more matter-of-fact age much of his musical and verbal rhetoric sounds empty, but through it all the intellectuality and sincerity of the man are unmistakable. On the whole, it is hardly possible to name another composer who possessed at once such a broad culture, such a consistent idealism, and such a high integrity.

VI

In Hector Berlioz (b. 1803 at Côte St. André, Isère) we have one of those few men who is not to be explained by any amount of examination of sources. Only to a small extent was he _specifically_ determined by his environment. He is unique in his time and in musical history. He, again, is to be explained only as a gift of Heaven (or of the devil, as his contemporaries thought). In a general way, however, he is very brilliantly to be explained by the Paris of 1830. The external tumult, the breaking of rules, the assertion of individuality, all worked upon his sensitive spirit and dominated his creative genius. He was at bottom a childlike, affectionate man, ‘demanding at every moment in his life to love and be loved,’ as Romain Rolland says. In Renaissance Florence, we may imagine, he might have been a Fra Angelico, or at least no more bumptious than a Filippo Lippi. It was because he was so delicately sensitive that he became, in the Paris of 1830, a violent revolutionist.

His father was a provincial physician and, like so many other fathers in artistic history, seemed to the end of his days ashamed of the fact that he had a genius for a son. The boy imbibed his first music among the amateurs of his town. He went to Paris to study medicine--because his father would provide him funds for nothing else. He loyally studied his science for a while, but nothing could keep him out of music. Without his father’s consent or even knowledge he entered the Conservatory, where he remained at swords’ points with the director, Cherubini, who cuts a ridiculous figure in his ‘Memoirs.’ By hook and crook, and by the generosity of creditors, he managed to live on and get his musical education. His father became partially reconciled when he realized there was nothing else to do. But how Berlioz took to heart the lawlessness of the romantic school! Nothing that was, was right. All that is most typically Gallic--clearness, economy, control--is absent in his youthful work. ‘Ah, me!’ says he in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘what was the good God thinking of when He dropped me down in this pleasant land of France?’

The events of his career are not very significant. He had a wild time of shocking people. He organized concerts of his own works, chiefly by borrowing money. After two failures he won the _Prix de Rome_, and hardly reached Italy when he started to leave it on a picaresque errand of sentimental revenge. He fell in love with an English actress, Henriette Smithson, married her when she was _passée_ and in debt, and eventually treated her rather shamefully. He gave concerts of his works in France, Germany, England, Russia. He was made curator of the Conservatory library. He was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. He wrote musical articles for the papers. He took life very much to heart. And, from time to time, he wrote musical works, very few of them anything less than masterpieces. That is all. The details of his life make entertaining reading. Very little is significant beyond an understanding of his personal character. He was called the genius without talent. Romain Rolland comes closer when he says, ‘Berlioz is the most extreme combination of power of genius with weakness of character.’ His power of discovering orchestral timbres is only equalled by his power of making enemies. There is no villainy recorded of his life; there are any number of mean things, and any number of wild, irrational things. His artistic sincerity is unquestioned, but it is mingled with any amount of the bad boy’s delight in shocking others. Like Schumann, but in his own manner, he made himself a crusader against the Philistines.

Of the unhappiness of his life it is quite sufficient to say that it was his own fault. His creed was the subjective, sentimental creed of the romanticists: ‘Sensible people,’ he exclaims, ‘cannot understand this intensity of being, this actual joy in existing, in dragging from life the uttermost it has to give in height and depth.’ He was haunted, too, by the romanticists’ passion for bigness. His ideal orchestra, he tells us in his work on Instrumentation, consists of 467 instruments--160 violins, 30 harps, eight pairs of kettle drums, 12 bassoons, 16 horns, and other instruments in similar abundance.

His great importance in the history of music is, of course, his development of the orchestra. No one else has ever observed orchestral possibilities so keenly and used them so surely. His musical ideas, as played on the piano, may sound banal, but when they are heard in the orchestra they become pure magic. He never was a pianist; his virtuosity as a performer was lavished on the flute and guitar. For this reason, perhaps, his orchestral writing is the least pianistic, the most inherently contrapuntal of any of the period.

He was a pioneer in freeing instrumental music from the dominance of traditional forms. Forms may be always necessary, but their _raison d’être_, as Berlioz insisted, should be expressive and not traditional. Berlioz was the first great exponent of program music; Liszt owes an immense amount to him. He was also the first to use in a thorough-going way the _leit-motif_, or the _idée fixe_, as he called it. Not that he developed the theory of the dramatic use of the _leit-motif_ as Wagner did, but he made extensive use of the melody expressive of a particular idea or personage. His output was limited, both in range and in quantity, but there are few composers who have had a higher average of excellence throughout their work--always on the understanding that you like his subject-matter. The hearer who does not may intellectually admit his technical mastery of the orchestra, but he will feel that the composer is sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

VII

Frédéric Chopin was far less influenced by external events than most composers of the time. We have the legend that the C minor _Étude_ was written to express his emotions upon hearing of the capture of Warsaw by the Russians in 1831. We hear a good deal (perhaps too much) about the national strain in his music. The national dance rhythms enter into his work, and, to some extent, the national musical idiom, though refined out of any real national expressiveness. Beyond this his music would apparently have been the same, whatever the state of the world at large.

Nor are the events of his life of any particular significance. He was born near Warsaw, in Poland, in 1810, the son of a teacher who later became professor of French in the Lyceum of Warsaw. His father had sufficient funds for his education, and the lad received excellent instruction in music--in composition chiefly--at the Warsaw Conservatory. At nine he appeared as a concert pianist, and frequently thereafter. He was a sensitive child, but hardly remarkable in any way. There are child love affairs to be recorded by careful biographers, with fancied influences on his art. In composition he was not precocious, his Opus 1 appearing at the age of eighteen. A visit to Vienna in 1829 decided him in his career of professional pianist, and in 1830 he left Warsaw on a grand concert tour. In 1831 he reached Paris, where he lived most of his life thereafter. His Opus 2 was ‘announced’ to the world by the discerning Schumann, in the famous phrase, ‘Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!’ In 1837, through Liszt’s machinations, he met Madame Dudevant, known to fame by her pen name, George Sand. She was the one great love affair of his life. Their visit to Majorca, which has found a nesting place in literature in George Sand’s _Un Hiver à Majorque_, was a rather dismal failure. The result was an illness, which his mistress nursed him through, and this began the continued ill health that lasted until his death. After Majorca came more composition and lessons in Paris, with summer visits to George Sand at her country home, and occasional trips to England. Then, in 1849, severe sickness and death.

All that was really important in Chopin’s life happened within himself. No other great composer of the time is so utterly self-contained. Though he lived in an age of frenzied ‘schools’ and propaganda, he calmly worked as pleased him best, choosing what suited his personality and letting the rest go. His music is, perhaps, more consistently personal than that of any other composer of the century. It is remarkable, too, that the chief contemporary musical influences on his work came from second and third-rate men. He was intimate with Liszt, he was friendly with the Schumanns. But from them he borrowed next to nothing. Yet he worshipped Bach and Mozart. Nothing of the romantic Parisian frenzy of the thirties enters into his music; the only influence which the creed of the romanticists had upon him seems to have been the freeing of his mind from traditional obstacles, but it is doubtful whether his mind was not already quite free when he reached Paris. All that he did was peculiarly his; his choice and rejection were accurate in the extreme.

In his piano playing he represented quite another school from that of Liszt. He was gentle where Liszt was frenzied; he was graceful where Liszt was pompous. Or, rather, his playing was of no school, but was simply his own. His imitators exaggerated his characteristics, carrying his _rubato_ to a silly extreme. But no competent witness has testified that Chopin ever erred in taste. The criticism was constantly heard, during his lifetime, that he played too softly, that his tone was insufficient to fill a large hall. It was his style; he did not change because of his critics. He was not, perhaps, a virtuoso of the first rank, but all agree that the things which he did he did supremely well. The supreme grace of his compositions found its best exponent in him. Ornaments, such as the cadenzas of the favorite E flat Nocturne, he played with a liquid quality that no one could imitate. His rubato carried with it a magical sense of personal freedom, but was never too marked--was not a rubato at all, some say, since the left hand kept the rhythm quite even.

As a workman Chopin was conscientious in the extreme. He never allowed a work to go to the engraver until he had put the last possible touch of perfection to it. His posthumous compositions he desired never to have published. His judgment of them was correct; they are in almost every case inferior to the work which he gave to the public. Just where his individuality came from, no one can say; it seems to have been born in him. From Field[81] he borrowed the Nocturne form, or rather name. From Hummel[82] and Cramer[83] he borrowed certain details of pianistic style. From the Italians he caught a certain luxurious grace that is not to be found in French or German music. But none of this explains the genius by which he turned his borrowings into great music.

Emotionally Chopin ranks perhaps as the greatest of composers. In subjective expression and the evocation of mood, apart from specific suggestion by words or ‘program,’ he is supreme. He is by no means merely the dreamy poet which we sometimes carelessly suppose. Nothing can surpass the force and vigor of his Polonaises, or the liveliness of his Mazurkas. In harmony his invention was as inexhaustible as in melody, and later music has borrowed many a progression from him. Indeed, in this respect he was one of the most original of composers. It has been said that in harmony there has been nothing new since Bach save only Chopin, Wagner, and Debussy. But, however radical his progressions may be, they are never awkward. They have that smoothness and that seeming inevitableness which the artist honors with the epithet, ‘perfection.’ Chopin’s genius was wholly for the piano; in the little writing he did for orchestra or other instruments (mostly in connection with piano solo) there is nothing to indicate that music would have been the richer had he departed from his chosen field. In a succeeding chapter more will be said about his music. As to the man himself, it is all in his music. Any biographical detail which we can collect must pale before the Preludes, the Études, and the Polonaises.

* * * * *

An ‘average music-lover,’ about 1845, being questioned as to whom he thought the greatest living composer, would almost undoubtedly have replied, ‘Mendelssohn.’ For Mendelssohn had just the combination of qualities which at the time could most charm people, giving them enough of the new to interest and enough of the old to avoid disconcerting shocks. Our average music-lover would have gone on to say that Mendelssohn had absorbed all that was good in romantic music--the freshness, the pictorial suggestiveness, the freedom from dry traditionalism--and had synthesized it with the power and clearness of the old forms. Mendelssohn was the one of the romantic composers who was instantly understood. His reputation has diminished steadily in the last half century. One does not say this vindictively, for his polished works are as delightful to-day as ever. But historically he cannot rank for a moment with such men as Liszt, Schumann, or Chopin. When we review the field we discover that he added no single new element to musical expression. His forms were the classical ones, only made flexible enough to hold their romantic content. His harmony, though fresh, was always strictly justified by classical tradition. His instrumentation, charming in the extreme, was only a restrained and tasteful use of resources already known and used. In a history of musical development Mendelssohn deserves no more than passing mention.

Of all the great musicians of history none ever received in his youth such a broad and sound academic education. In every way he was one of fortune’s darlings. His life, like that of few other distinguished men of history (Macaulay alone comes readily to mind), was little short of ideal. He was born in 1809 in Hamburg, son of a rich Jewish banker. Early in his life the family formally embraced Christianity, which removed from the musician the disabilities he would otherwise have suffered in public life. His family life during his youthful years in Berlin was that which has always been traditionally Jewish--affectionate, simple, vigorous, and inspiring--and his education the best that money could secure. His father cultivated his talents with greatest care, but he was never allowed to become a spoiled child or to develop without continual kindly criticism. He became a pianist of almost the first rank, and was precocious in composition, steadily developing technical finish and individuality. At the age of 17, under the inspiration of the reading of Shakespeare with his sister Fanny, he wrote the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, as finished and delightful a work as there is in all musical literature. At twenty he was given money to travel and look about the world for his future occupation. As a conductor (chiefly of his own works) and, to a lesser extent, as a pianist he steadily became more famous, until, in 1835, he was invited to become conductor of the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig. In this position he rapidly became the most noted and perhaps the most immediately influential musician in Europe. From 1840 to 1843 he was connected with Berlin, where Frederick William IV had commissioned him to organize a musical academy, but in 1843 he did better by organizing the famous Conservatory at Leipzig, of which he was made director, with Schumann and Moscheles on the teaching staff. In 1847, after his tenth visit to England, he heard of the death of his beloved sister Fanny, and shortly afterward died. All Europe felt his death as a peculiarly personal loss.

What we feel in the man, beyond all else, is poise--one of the best of human qualities but not the most productive in art. He knew and loved the classical musicians--Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven--indeed, the ‘resurrection’ of Bach dates from his performance of the Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1828. He also felt, in a delicate way, the romantic spirit of the age, and gave the most charming poetical pictures in his overtures. All that he did he did with a polish that recalls Mozart. His self-criticism was not profound, but was always balanced. In his personal character he seems almost disconcertingly perfect; we find ourselves wishing that he had committed a few real sins so as to become more human. His appreciation of other musicians was generous but limited; he never fully understood the value of Schumann, and his early meeting with Berlioz, though impeccably polite, was quite mystifying. His ability as an organizer and director was marked. His work in Leipzig made that city, next to Paris, the musical centre of Europe. Though his culture was broad he was scarcely affected by external literary or political currents, except to refine certain aspects of them for use in his music.

VIII

There were more reasons than the accidental conjunction of the Schumanns and Mendelssohn for the brilliant position of Leipzig in German musical life. For centuries the city had been, thanks to its university, one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Being also a mercantile centre, it became the logical location for numerous publishing firms. The prestige and high standard of the _Thomasschule_, of which Bach had for many years been ‘Cantor,’ had stimulated its musical life, and even when Mendelssohn arrived in 1835 the Gewandhaus Orchestra was one of the most excellent in Europe. The intellectual life of the city was of the sort that has done most honor to Germany--vigorous, scholarly, and critical, but self-supporting and self-contained. Around Mendelssohn and his influence there grew up the ‘Leipzig school,’ with Ferdinand Hiller,[84] W. Sterndale Bennett,[85] Carl Reinecke,[86] and Niels W. Gade[87] as its chief figures. Mendelssohn’s emphasis on classicism and moderation was probably responsible for the tendency of this school to degenerate into academic dryness, but this was not present to dim its brilliancy during Mendelssohn’s life.

In the ‘Leipzig circle’ Schumann was always something of an outsider. Though he was much more of Leipzig than Mendelssohn, he was too much of a revolutionary to be immediately influential. Nor did he have Mendelssohn’s advantages in laying hold on the public. For the first twenty years of his life his connection with music was only that of the enthusiastic dilettante. Though his father, a bookseller of Zwickau in Saxony, favored the development of his musical gifts, his mother feared an artistic career and kept him headed toward the profession of lawyer until his inclinations became too strong. In the meantime he had graduated from the Gymnasium of Zwickau, where he was born in 1810, and entered the University of Leipzig as a student of law. His sensitiveness to all artistic influences in his youth was extremely marked, especially to the efflorescent poet and pseudo-philosopher, Jean Paul Richter (Jean Paul), on whom Schumann later based his literary style. In his youth he would organize amateur orchestras among his playfellows or entertain them with musical descriptions of their personalities on the piano. When, at about seventeen, he arrived in Leipzig to study in the University, he plunged into music, in particular studying the piano under Frederick Wieck, whose daughter, the brilliant pianist, Clara Wieck, later became his wife. An accident to his hand, due to over-zeal in practice, shattered his hopes of becoming a concert pianist, and he took to composition. He now devoted his efforts to repairing the gaps in his theoretical education, though not until a number of years later was he completely at home in the various styles of writing. His romantic courtship of Clara Wieck culminated, in 1840, in their marriage, against her father’s wishes. Their life together was devoted and happy. The year of their marriage is that of Schumann’s most fertile and creative work. His life from this time on was the strenuous one of composer and conductor, with not a few concert tours in which he conducted and his wife played his compositions. But more immediately fruitful was his literary work as editor of the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, founded in 1834 to champion the romantic tendencies of the younger composers. Toward 1845 there were signs of a failing in physical and mental powers and at times an enforced cessation of activity. In 1853 he suffered extreme mental depression, and his mind virtually gave way. An attempted suicide in 1854 was followed by his confinement in a sanatorium, and his death followed in 1856.

Schumann is the most distinguished in the list of literary musicians. His early reactions to romantic tendencies in literature were intense, and when the time came for him to use his pen in defense of the music of the future he had an effective literary style at his command. It was the style of the time. Mere academic or technical criticism he despised, not because he despised scholarship, but because he felt it had no place in written criticism. He set himself to interpret the spirit of music. True to romantic ideals, he was subjective before all. He sent his soul out on adventures among the masterpieces--or, rather, his souls; for he possessed several. One he called ‘Florestan,’ fiery, imaginative, buoyant; another was ‘Eusebius,’ dreamy and contemplative. It was these two names which chiefly appeared beneath his articles. Then there was a third, which he used seldom, ‘Meister Raro,’ cool judgment and impersonal reserve. He set himself to ‘make war on the Philistines,’ namely, all persons who were stodgy, academic, and dry. He had a fanciful society of crusaders among his friends which he dubbed the _Davidsbund_. With this equipment of buoyant fancy he was the best exemplar of the romantic idealism of his time and race.

The _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, organized in connection with enthusiastic friends, bravely battled for imagination and direct expression in music during the ten years of Schumann’s immediate editorship and during his contributing editorship thereafter. Schumann’s ‘announcement’ of Chopin in 1831, and of Brahms in 1853, have become famous. In most things his judgment was extraordinarily sound. Though he was frankly an apologist for one tendency, he appreciated many others, not excluding the reserved Mendelssohn, who was in many things his direct opposite. Sometimes, particularly in his prejudice against opera music, he disagreed with the tendencies of the time. After hearing ‘Tannhäuser’ in Dresden he could say nothing warmer than that on the whole he thought Wagner might some day be of importance to German opera. But, though Schumann was thus limited, he had the historical sense, and had scholarship behind his articles, if not in them. During a several months’ stay in Vienna he set himself to discovering forgotten manuscripts of Schubert, and the great C major symphony, first performed under Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus concerts in 1839, owes its recovery to him.

Schumann worked generously in all forms except church music. At first he was chiefly a composer for the piano, and his genre pieces, ‘pianistic’ in a quite new way, opened the field for much subsequent music from other pens. In them his romantic fervor best shows itself. They are buoyantly pictorial and suggestive, though avoiding extremes, and they abound in literary mottoes. In 1840 begins his chief activity as a song composer, and here he takes a place second only to Schubert in lovableness and second to none in intimate subjective expression. Between 1841 and 1850 come four lovely symphonies, uneven in quality and without distinction in instrumentation, but glowing with vigorous life. In the last ten years of his life come the larger choral works, the ‘Faust’ scenes, several cantatas, the ---- and the opera ‘Genoveva.’ Throughout the latter part of his life are scattered the chamber works which are permanent additions to musical literature. These works, and their contributions to musical development, will be described in succeeding chapters.

* * * * *

These are the preëminent romantic composers. What they have in common is not so evident as seems at first glance. The very creed that binds them together makes them highly individual and dispartite. At bottom, the only possible specific definition of romantic music is a description of romantic music itself. ‘Romantic’ is at best a loose term; and it happens always to be a relative term.

But a brief formal statement of the old distinction between ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ may be helpful in following the description of romantic music in the following chapters. For the terms have taken on some sort of precise meaning in their course down the centuries. Perhaps the chief distinction lies in the æsthetic theory concerning limits. The Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral are the standard examples. The Greek loved to work intensively on a specific problem, within definite and known limits, controlling every detail with his intelligence and achieving the utmost perfection possible to careful workmanship. The Greek temple is small in size, can be taken in at a glance; every line is clear and definitely terminated; details are limited in number and each has its reason for existing; the work is a unit and each part is a part of an organic whole. The mediæval workman, on the other hand, was impressed by the richness of a world which he by no means understood; he loved to see all sorts of things in the heavens above and the earth beneath and to express them in his art. Ruskin makes himself the apologist for the Gothic cathedral when he says: ‘Every beautiful detail added is so much richness gained for the whole.’ The mediæval cathedral, then, is an amazing aggregation of rich detail. Unity is a minor matter. The cathedral is never to be taken in at a glance. Its lines drive upward and vanish into space; it is filled with dark corners and mysterious designs. It is an attempt to pierce beyond limits and achieve something more universal.

Here is the distinction, and it is more a matter of individual temperament than of historical action and reaction. The poise and control that come from working within pre-defined limits are the chief glory of the classical; the imagination and energy that come from trying to pass beyond limits are the chief charm of the romantic. Let us never expect to settle the controversy, for both elements exist in all artists, even in Berlioz. But let us try to understand how the artist feels toward each of these inspirations, and to see what, in each age, is the specific impulse toward one or the other.

H. K. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] ‘Uhland’s Life,’ by his widow.

[75] Heine: _Die romantische Schule._

[76] Wilhelm Langhans: ‘The History of Music,’ Eng. transl. by J. H. Cornell, 1886.

[77] _Ibid._

[78] Fyffe: ‘History of Modern Europe’, Vol. I.

[79] He was a pupil first of his stepbrother, Fridolin, of Heuschkel in Hildburghausen, of Michael Haydn in Salzburg (1797), of Kalcher in theory, and Valesi in singing.

[80] Reinach’s ‘Apollo.’

[81] John Field, b. Dublin, 1782; d. Moscow, 1837; pianist and composer; was a pupil of Clementi, whom he followed to Paris and later to St. Petersburg, where he became noted as a teacher. Afterwards he gave concerts successfully in London, as well as in Belgium, France, and Italy. His 20 ‘Nocturnes’ for pianoforte are the basis of his fame. Being the first to use the name, he may be considered to have established the type. His other compositions include concertos, sonatas, etc., and some chamber music.

[82] Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837). Sec Vol. XI.

[83] Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858). See Vol. XI.

[84] Born, Frankfort, 1811; died, Cologne, 1885; was a man of many parts, brilliant pianist and conductor, composer of fine sensibility and mastery of form, and a talented critic and author; cosmopolite and friend of many distinguished musicians, from Cherubini to Berlioz, and especially of Mendelssohn. He left operas, symphonies, oratorios, chamber music, etc., and theoretical works. His smaller works--piano pieces and songs--are still popular.

[85] Born, Sheffield, England, 1816; died, London, 1875. See Vol. XI.

[86] Born in Altona, near Hamburg, 1824; a highly educated musician, distinguished as pianist, conductor, composer, pedagogue, and critic. As conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and as professor of piano and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory he exerted a long and powerful influence. As composer he followed the school of Mendelssohn and Schumann, was very prolific and distinguished by brilliant musicianship and ingenious if not highly original imagination. Besides operas, _singspiele_ cantatas, symphonies, etc., he published excellent chamber music and many piano works.

[87] See Vol. III. Chap. I.